Aren’t Some Issues Just Too Complex?
Each time a referendum looms someone admonishes that controversial matters are too complex for a simplistic Yes or No answer. Canada’s minister of democratic institutions asserted in 2016 that referendums “do not easily lend themselves to effectively deciding complex issues.” In tandem with this problem of big-decision “complexity,” it’s suggested “the people” aren’t capable of answering ballot questions, anyway, because the issues are obviously beyond their inexpert comprehension.
This recurring chorus of anti-democratic sentiment, expressed in new voices through the generations, is sometimes refreshed by new arguments. For example: referendums are no longer needed because opinion polling has been invented. Everybody can see how reliable opinion sampling is, with pre-voting surveys in May 2013 revealing that the NDP, not the Liberals, would govern British Columbia in the wake of that year’s general election; in May 2015 that Wild Rose, not the NDP, would be in charge of Alberta’s government; and in 2016 that President Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, would be living in the White House. More recently, another novel argument against referendums, already noted, is that they risk making people “emotional.”
In 2016 a wave of arguments against citizens answering ballot questions, as a component of our democratic life, washed over Canada in the aftermath of Brexit and with the prospect of a national referendum on electoral reform. “Referendums and democracy don’t mix,” opined Janice Stein of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. “In a functioning representative democracy, referenda are almost always a bad idea,” said NDP veteran Robin Sears. Political observer Susan Delacourt wrote that “a simple yes-or-no referendum” on electoral reform had likely become a non-starter in Canada due to the “raw simplicity” of the Leave or Remain question for voters in the United Kingdom and ensuing “regrets” about a majority choosing to leave the European Community.
But political columnist Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail countered that “the electoral system is too important to be left to the politicians” and argued his case for why the people should choose the best system by referendum. Gordon Gibson, who’d chaired British Columbia’s citizens’ assembly on electoral reform, likewise contended a referendum should be held. Neither considered the subject “too complex” for voters.
Andrew Coyne, balancing the case, said the merit of Canadians having a referendum on the electoral system ought to be evaluated according to Canadian circumstances and our own democratic approaches, not the “alleged lessons from Brexit” that referendum opponents were advancing.
Are Prohibition, Conscription, and Constitutions Complex?
When Canadians voted in 1898, the issue involved prohibiting alcohol’s manufacture, distribution, sale, and consumption. Such a policy had economic, religious, social, and cultural dimensions interwoven with political and legal aspects, with prohibition support often underpinned by a zealous Protestant social movement for “moral uplift,” and ardent opposition from free-spending distillers, brewers, tavern owners, and drinkers. Men had the vote. Women did not, but they campaigned actively to influence the referendum outcome. By any standard, the 1898 referendum instigated by Prime Minister Laurier’s Liberals encompassed a lot of “complexities.”
The second time Canadians answered a ballot question was in the middle of a cataclysmic world war. Voters in 1940 had given an electoral mandate, based on the Liberals’ solemn campaign promise to never impose conscription for overseas military service, which handily resulted in the party’s re-election. But by 1942, Prime Minister King’s Liberal government wanted to reverse that mandate and bring in conscription. National survival in the face of global warfare whose outcome was gravely uncertain, political ethics about honouring the bond of trust with voters, the detrimental and distracting impact on war preparations of a three-month referendum, and the contentious issue of ordering Canadians overseas to wage war and risk death and maiming all contributed many layers to the 1942 ballot question’s “complexity.”
The third time we went to the polls, the ballot question asked whether we approved fundamental changes in our Constitution that would dramatically alter the exercise of power in eight major areas, from aboriginal governance to offshore mineral rights. A full catechism of “complexities” for each of the interwoven components in the Charlottetown Accord exceeds space limitations here but are elaborated in Chapter 18, “Voting on Confederation,” to a greater degree.
These referendums on alcohol, conscription, and fundamental rewriting of our Constitution were laced with complexities. Yet, looking back, who would contend there was any better way to tackle those challenging decisions than through a direct vote by the people who would have to live with the consequences?
Decisions Reduce to “Raw Simplicity” of Yes or No
The reality of making decisions, whether by public ballot or around the cabinet table, in a constituent assembly or at the family table, is that after hearing pros and cons and taking time to “think it over,” the outcome must always be Yes or No. An uncertain response with many caveats is useless in making a decision. There is no place on the ballot for Maybe.
Cabinets and parliaments must decide every issue that arises one way or the other. Will we sign a trade treaty with the United States? Yes or No? Shall we declare war on Nazi Germany? Yes or No? When I voted as an MP in the House of Commons, the choice following debate over a measure’s many dimensions was either Yea or Nay. Of course, a third option was to abstain, and sometimes an MP refused to stand and be counted, just as some voters stay home from the polls. Such neutrality might salve one’s conscience or sidestep a private dilemma, but it doesn’t get the decision made. Others have to decide the matter by their votes, because uncast ballots and abstentions don’t do the job for a self-governing democracy.
Despite all the jostling considerations, the most complex decisions come down, in the end, to Yes or No. In the personal choices of life — Will I marry this person? Should we buy this house? Shall I stop smoking? — the answer can only be Yes, or No. At the end of a difficult criminal trial, the accused must either be convicted or acquitted. Even grand matters fraught with competing interests require either a red or a green light: building the St. Lawrence Seaway, developing nuclear-powered generating stations, fighting a war in Korea or Afghanistan, constructing pipelines for oil and natural gas, decriminalizing marijuana, allowing death with dignity for terminally ill individuals.
Acknowledging that issues are “complex,” and especially that they’re made to appear that way by Canada’s academics, public commentators, and government consultants whose livelihoods depend on others deferring to them for explanation and comprehension, doesn’t erase the fact that decisions must be made. At some point, somewhere, somebody up or down the line says either Yes, or No.
Are Referendums More Complex Than Elections?
If, as critics of ballot questions contend, people aren’t able to understand complex issues in a referendum, how do we possibly manage when faced with a general election? It is hard to conjure anything more complex than the choice presented to voters during an all-inclusive election. We want the best of all programs, but they’re offered by different parties. We want one person as prime minister, but prefer the local candidate of a different party. We only get one ballot, and on it we must make a single choice.
In a referendum campaign, voting takes place after a period of debate about pros and cons, but there is only one issue to decide. The focus is on a principle, not personalities. How much clearer, simpler, and democratic could that be?
When answering a ballot question, just one important issue is getting decided; when voting in an election, the keys to complete power of government are being handed over. Based on the comparison, and applying the logic of those who oppose citizens voting in a referendum because the issue is “too complex,” we should have abolished general elections long ago.
The Conceit of Expertise
This feigned apprehension about the complexity of issues, and this attitude that mere citizens shouldn’t get to vote on them, is grounded in several factors, among them the fact some legislators don’t want their already limited legislative role diluted any further by a process that shares it with their electors. Another is that some legislators are reluctant to declare their stance on a contentious issue, as a referendum would inevitably require, fearing it could erode their own voter support. Third, the political establishment’s determined control over processes affecting the public agenda has permeated the thinking of some academics and public commentators, particularly those with close affinity to the centres of power, a relationship that in some cases is enhanced by lucrative consulting contracts.
Finally, quite a few people, whether for reasons of higher education or higher income, infused with a precocious sense of social superiority, dismiss “the people” as ignorant folk liable to be influenced like sheep or swayed as a mob. It helps to demonize one’s enemy by depersonalizing them. So this swath of Canada’s political class now refers to citizens as “demographics” and labels where people reside not as named communities but area codes and postal codes. Detached and amorphous, it becomes easier not to engage individuals as fellow citizens in a self-governing democratic society, easier to think in clinically manipulative terms and impersonal abstractions.
Their conceit is that “the experts” understand things, grasp truth, and know reality, while “the people” have mere whims and opinions. It is wrong for every voter to get a ballot, they easily conclude, because not all voters are equal.
This mixture of ingredients leads those who accept such premises to oppose Canadians ever expressing support or opposition to a measure by answering Yes or No to a ballot question.
Condemning Referendums as “Not Part of Democracy”
Unlike the mere sideswipes others take against referendums, professor Janice Stein comes at this with a complete and articulate embrace of bundled arguments. And because her extensive airtime on CBC Television and TVO bathe the public in her contention that “referendums and democracy don’t mix,” professor Stein’s long-held anti-referendum views, such as were published through the auspices of TVO on June 24, 2016, provide a convenient teaching moment. Her catalogue of complaint begins:
How well do referendums serve democracy? Not well, whether they fail or pass. Not well, because leaders always have to simplify complex decisions into a “yes” or “no” question. Not well, because referendums often give prominence to issues that are not at the top of voters’ priorities, as Brexit did. Not well, because representatives have the chance through their party leaders to craft compromises. Voters do not: it’s up or down. Not well, because leaders in a referendum campaign have every incentive to oversimplify and overdramatize, playing on people’s fears to get out the vote. Not well, because referendums inflame passions and leave in their wake divided countries and divided families. It is for all these reasons that we elect representatives who form governments.
There’s more to her argument, but before proceeding to them it’s best to first deconstruct these interlocked opinions. Stein, in critiquing referendums because they “simplify complex decisions” so they can be answered Yes or No by the people, expresses preference for what she posits as the alternative — elected representatives of the people voting instead on compromises. Where was the “compromise” when MPs voted to declare war against Germany in 1939? What compromise attended the Trudeau government’s 1970 replacement of Canada’s entrenched Imperial system of measurement with metric? Whether that non-existent ballot question about going metric had received either a majority Yes or No, Canadians would have gained a surer grasp of the far-reaching implications of the move than its expert proponents displayed. In Parliament it was either “up or down” for every vote, from implementing the GST or ending capital punishment to ratifying the Free Trade Agreement or criminalizing abortion. Along with all other “elected representatives,” I faced the same black-and-white possibility facing voters on a ballot question. The watertight compartments between simple questions, complex issues, compromises, and who is best to vote on them exist only in the theoretical configuration fantasized by professor Stein in order to exclude referendums as, somehow, not part of “democracy.”
Next argument up is that ballot questions “give prominence to issues” not at the top of voters’ priorities. This “top-of-mind” ranking is a nebulous concept upon which to oppose citizens answering a question in a democratic society. Actual experience in Canada provides stronger grounding than do imputed concepts about what scholars assume to be voter priorities. Janice Stein’s theory reverses effect and cause. The reason referendums about restricting or prohibiting people’s access to alcoholic beverages took place nationally and in all provinces, as well as in hundreds of “local option” municipalities, was that the contentious policy had long been a dominant public issue with implications for just about everybody. The reason Quebecers voted in two referendums on separation in 1980 and 1995, and all Canadians voted in 1992 on a constitutional package intended to deal with the same issue, is that “national unity” had been so “prominent” as to dominate our public life for three full decades. Ongoing experiences in Canada constitute a more relevant standard for evaluating when and why referendums are appropriate than vaguely conceptualized criteria about which issues are worthy of “prominence,” or the fiction that some ranking exists “at the top of voters’ priorities” that allows detached observers to certify which concerns ought to be addressed and which not.
Stein’s third contention that “referendums and democracy don’t mix” is stated this way: “Leaders in a referendum campaign have every incentive to oversimplify and overdramatize, playing on people’s fears to get out the vote.” If you substitute “election campaign” for “referendum campaign” in that sentence, what comes up on the screen is a parade of Canadian elections in which leaders oversimplified, overdramatized, and played on people’s fears “to get out the vote.” The professor’s artificial segregation of one component of a self-governing society from its other working parts leads inexorably to the conclusion that elections and democracy don’t mix, either.
A fourth damnation of ballot questions by Janice Stein, echoed in 2016 public comments by cabinet minister Maryam Monsef and public commentator Robin Sears, is that “referendums inflame passions and leave in their wake divided countries and divided families.” What referendums actually do is provoke thought. A crucial public policy is placed before Canadians, among the most highly educated people in the world. As the referendum campaign gets under way, intelligent people are beneficiaries of a comprehensive system of communications and news reporting organizations that for several weeks becomes a nationwide or provincial “teach-in” on the pros and cons of the ballot question. Simultaneously, election officials conducting the referendum send all households a “publicity pamphlet,” if required as it typically is by statute, in which both sides get equal space to explain to voters its side of the issue. Community halls fill with public meetings for discussion and debate, broadcasters host panels to evaluate the issue’s implications, families and friends talk over the prospects for voting one way or the other, and a democratic society comes into its own. Although other countries cope with this trauma of decision-making, the emotional fragility of Canadians is now touted as reason to save us from having to answer a ballot question.
Emotion necessarily flows in and through these experiences because we are humans and because what we are asked to decide is significant for us. To worry that a ballot question will “inflame passions” should cause a professor of international relations such as Stein to cancel classes rather than broach the intensely controversial issues that necessarily constitute her curriculum and that should, if properly taught, certainly make students emotional. If conduct of public affairs is to be entirely cerebral and unemotional, so by logical extension should be the study of public affairs — in the sanitized, dehumanized, detached universe idealized by one who denounces “pure democracy.” To say referendums “leave in their wake divided countries and divided families” is sophistry, suggesting the referendum actually caused the division, rather than serves to accurately reveal a pre-existing but previously unquantified condition.
Proceeding now to more of professor Stein’s case, as published by TVO, we enter the universe of controlled democracy where experts know best. Arguing that, by a majority favouring the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, “voters did not behave as they were expected to.” She expects that voters “usually favour the status quo” and “are risk-averse, especially when they’re reasonably comfortable.” Such assertions about voter behaviour and expectations of other people bring little credit to the “science” of politics. This supposition that “risk-averse” voters mostly favour things staying as they are ignores how an all-male electorate in British Columbia answered Yes to women getting voting rights a century ago, or how a decade and a half ago Northwest Territories voters approved fundamental change in their governmental arrangements — and how, in between, other referendum results didn’t maintain the status quo on public utilities, denominational schools, availability of alcohol, marketing of agricultural products, or adding fluoride to municipal water supplies.
To advance her case that voters really aren’t up to deciding any public measure by ballot, Stein alleges that in the European Union “some members have had to schedule a second referendum in order to overcome voters’ aversion to changing the status quo.” Translation: the dumb people just didn’t get it at first. “All the experts thought the same pattern would prevail in Britain,” she added about Brexit.
Experience with referendums about the European Union was not, however, quite as asserted. When a European constitution was drafted in 2005, each member country had to ratify it before it took effect. The Dutch held a referendum, and so did the French upon hearing that the British might do so. No other country, when following its own path to ratification, included a referendum.
Voters in the Netherlands and France rejected the European constitution after extensive debate about every conceivable merit and disadvantage it had for their country. No second referendum took place in either. In both countries, the political parties and elected representatives were fully engaged, together with the people, thrashing out the issues. The proposed referendum in the United Kingdom never took place.
Only in Ireland, several years later, did two referendums occur. The vote was on the Lisbon Treaty, whose negotiated adjustments would accommodate the European Community’s operations alongside the sovereign operations of member countries. In 2008 Irish voters turned down the treaty, many hearing from Roman Catholic pulpits that it would prevent Ireland from maintaining its staunch “pro-life” anti-abortion laws. Ireland’s refusal to ratify, in light of that vote, prevented the treaty coming into force despite every other member state having approved it. To break the impasse, clarifications were made about Irish sovereignty and in 2009, sixteen months after the first vote, 67 percent of voters in Ireland’s second referendum approved the Lisbon Treaty, overcoming a sole member country’s blockage of E.U. reforms. The “second round of voting” was not because slow-witted folks had to get up to speed, but resulted from a deliberate process and negotiated compromise, and achieving clarity about who had final say on abortion law, the outcome of a democratic dialectic in which the first referendum proved indispensable.
In Europe, where Stein stated “some members” had to schedule “a second referendum in order to overcome voters’ aversion to changing the status quo,” the only other country to do this, apart from that unique case of Ireland, was the United Kingdom. A ballot question about the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union first took place in 1975. The second, Brexit, was in 2016, forty years later. And the muddled politics of Britain’s unhappy connection with the continent is hardly a precedent from which a scholar ought to extract ironclad conclusions about European referendums and apply them to Canada.
To conclude her case that referendums and democracy are incompatible, Janice Stein triumphantly dismissed the Brexit impulse of U.K. voters. “Swept up in a wave of populist anger against elites, laced with a heavy dose of xenophobia and seasoned with a dash of nostalgia, they voted to break with Europe and go it alone.” But it wasn’t that simplistic. Britons never got a vote in the early 1970s when Edward Heath’s government first negotiated the United Kingdom’s terms of entry into the European Community, to endorse that fundamental change for their country. Pressure for electors to have a say resulted in the 1975 referendum, at which time a majority of Britons favoured the still-new arrangement. By 2016, however, with so much having changed in the European Community over four decades, and revised terms having been negotiated by Britain’s government, Prime Minister David Cameron accepted the need for electors to ratify the arrangement, and in the process, re-evaluate their country’s long-standing lukewarm adhesion to Continental Europe.
Jeffrey Simpson placed Brexit in this context on June 23, 2016, in the Globe and Mail, viewing the “Leave” victory not in sweeping generalizations about populist anger and xenophobia, but the truer forces of Britain’s own direct experience since the early 1970s living its “long, unhappy marriage of convenience” with the European Community.
It is neither the complexity of the issue, nor the preference of so-called policy experts, but rather the need for a clear verdict on a key issue that opens the possibility of resolving the dilemma of choice by a majority of informed citizens collectively answering Yes or No.
Even the biggest decisions are ultimately answered by a cabinet, a parliament, a jury, or an entire voting population with either Yes or No, Stay or Go. Experts themselves will never agree on the same conclusion, nor will those elected or appointed to public offices. When facing an irresolvable conundrum about a vital public question, the best resolution can be to force the choice. After all, in a democratic, self-governing system of government, the most authoritative voice with the greatest political legitimacy is that of the sovereign people, the folks in all walks of life in all parts of our country who daily experience our universe of realities and are competent to weigh in on something important that will affect who we are and what we do.